So living in an area that pulses are quite abundant, everyone is trying to exceed yields from past years.

When I first started in agriculture and peas and lentils were a fairly new venture yields were a lot better than first expected.  Now after growing pulses on this land we can’t get back up to those original yields.  I have done some trial work with ALPINE MicroBolt Mo which is a plant available source of molybdenum. The role of molybdenum in the plant is to transform nitrogen into amino acids, and allows legumes to fix nitrogen, which at the end of the day equates to yield.  Molybdenum can be either added to the drill row at seeding time through your Alpine kit or sprayed on at every pass with herbicide or fungicide.  It is a very cost effective product that we are seeing great benefits to in pulse crops.  It is a salt textured granular product that get used at 10-20 grams per acre per pass up to 50 grams a year.

Figure 1 Lentil on left had 10 grams of molybdenum added in the seed row at seeding
time applied through an ALPINE kit.

Figure 2 Lentils on the left had 10 grams of Molybdenum applied with herbicide

The pod counts today on the above plants is 127 pods on the plant with Molybdenum and most are double seeds and 65 on the plant without the Molybdenum and most are double seeds.  A common question is “If I use Molybdenum, do I still inoculate at seeding?  The answer is yes, Molybdenum is not a substitute for inoculant but rather compliments it.

– James